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Planetfall, for Armada players

Since Firestorm
Planetfall is the ground combat companion to Firestorm Armada, it’s
no surprise that it shares core mechanics with Armada. This post will
serve as a primer and “upgrade guide” for anyone familiar with
Armada but interested in Planetfall.

What’s the same?

Well, the core
mechanic of Exploding Dice is still present, and used in almost all
dice rolls just like in Armada. Weapons fire, shields, command
checks, and close quarter battle (melee, more or less) all use it in
most situations. Similarly, the concept of DR or Damage Rating is
basically identical. Damage Ratings in Planetfall range from 3 for
basic infantry, through 5 for some heavy infantry and light units,
around 7 for most tanks, and up to 11 for some of the heaviest and
most impressive units, the leviathans!

What’s a little
different?

There are several
of these. Activations is one of them. Planetfall takes the
alternating-by-unit concept of Armada, but modifies it a little bit.
When building a force, you assemble an assortment of “helixes”,
that really should be called hexes, because that’s their actual
shape. You start with a core hex, which will have some mandatory
units and some optional ones, and you can add more specialized hexes
like Heavy Support, Recon, Aerial, and others. Once you activate a
unit from a particular hex, you are required to finish activating the
units in that hex before you can move on to another one. This can
sometimes be exploited by a clever opponent, for example making an
attack on one flank while the currently-activating hex is on the
other flank.

The Critical Rating
of Armada has been removed and replaced with multiple Damage Ratings.
They’re not always the same number, however. Relthoza units, for
example, often get harder to damage as they get wounded. The damage
rating of one of their command tanks is listed as 7+8+9, meaning that
an undamaged one will take 7 hits to damage, but one that has already
lost two of its three damage points would require 9 hits to finish it
off. The pattern of the damage ratings varies by faction. Some are
constant, like 6+6, while others decrease, like 7+6+5. In that last
case, it would take 7 hits to put the first damage marker on a model,
but once it has two markers, 5 hits will be enough to finish it off!
Also, there are fewer damage points in Planetfall in general. A
Planetfall model will have about half the damage points of its Armada
counterpart. Light units typically have only one, medium units
analogous to cruisers have two, and the largest units have only four.
This makes for significantly less record-keeping than in Armada.

Weapons can still
be combined when a unit of multiple models fire, but it’s
significantly simpler. There is no dice-linking mechanic; you can
just total the dice of all the models that are able to fire. Also,
instead of subtracting dice from the pool, damage markers subtract
hits after the hits are calculated. Finally, you target a unit rather
than an individual model. Damage is applied to the nearest model, but
any damage that “overflows” will be applied to the next closest.
Yes, this makes the game fast and bloody!

It’s easier to
get shots at vulnerable angles than in Armada. A shot at the side
facing of a model treats all the damage ratings as one less, while a
shot at the rear reduces it by two.

What’s very
different?

The Relthozan cloaking field is significantly
changed. It is always on, but not nearly as effective as the Armada
version. Firing at a cloaked target is one of the exceptions to the
rule that you use Exploding Dice. In this scenario, you use a slight
modification called Heavy Dice. Sixes still count as two hits, but
you don’t get to throw the additional dice. Incidentally, the other
scenario where Heavy Dice come into play is if a Kinetic weapon fires
at a target with shields. If the weapon is firing at Effective Range
(there are currently only two range bands, Effective and Long), then
the shield roll to counter it uses Heavy rather than Exploding Dice.

There is no longer
a specific reserve phase. During activation of a helix that has
reserve units, instead of activating one of the units already on the
table, you can bring in one of the reserve units. They can move on
from the edge, but in most cases they will “Sky Drop” in, homing
in on a sky drop marker that was placed on the table during setup.
There will always be some scatter, however, so it’s best not to get
too risky.

Most importantly to
me, movement is much simpler. There are no minimum movements, and
generally only leviathans need to use a turning template. Models
moving at cruising speed can turn as often as they want, like SRS
tokens in Armada. The only restrictions on movement are that if you
go Flat Out (the second of two movement stats), it must be in a
straight line and most units can not fire after a Flat Out movement.

Well, there you have it! This turned out a little longer
than expected, but I don’t think it’s too bad. I suppose I would
be remiss without at least mentioning that a new version of the game
is in development, and there have been some teasers released. Most
things are minor tweaks and cleanups, but it looks like weapon
configurations are getting deeper. More range bands, and more types
of weapons, and apparently merging CQB with regular weapons. One new
type of weapon, currently called tertiary, is actually most effective
at longer ranges than short ones, so it might be intended as the
replacement for the artillery mechanic (no, I didn’t mention how
artillery works, but it’s kind of weird). Planetfall is a great
game, even though it shows that it is a 1.0 revision at this point.
Still, it is way better, and way better balanced, than a certain
version 7 game I could name!

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